The young playwright is shaking up British theatre with his furious voice, but he insists that he is not angry at anyone in particular

Mike Bartlett has a habit of presaging doom. In 2007 the Olivier award-winning 29-year-old’s second play, Artefacts, neatly detonated the myth that Western democracy was just around the corner for Iraq. His more recent Earthquakes in London, directed by Rupert Goold at the National, was an eye-popping, apocalyptic vision of climate change, seen through the prism of a single family, lurching dizzyingly through time from 1965 to 2525.

And his latest, Love, Love, Love, charts the rocketing tension between the baby-boomer generation and their disaffected progeny. When he began work on it, Bartlett says, very little had been written about